Ubuntu News Archives

The question of whether the Linux operating system should still be distributed as a 700MB CD ISO or whether they finally need to break that threshold and move to a DVD ISO or a USB-centered image has come up again for the Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric cycle.

This morning at the Ubuntu Developer Summit there was a discussion about Unity 2D, the lightweight 2D version of Canonical's Unity desktop that isn't dependent upon 3D (OpenGL) acceleration. Work on Unity 2D based on Qt began during the Ubuntu 11.04 cycle, but with Ubuntu 11.10 it should be more polished and comparable to the full-blown Unity desktop experience.

There's a lot happening on the ground in Budapest for the 11.10 Ubuntu Developer Summit. I've been tweeting a bit and will have more information later on published on Phoronix. One discussion though that's also been taking place on the Ubuntu developer mailing list has been about the use of systemd as the init system in Ubuntu or there the lack of.

While Ubuntu 11.04 was just released, there's many (including us) already looking towards Ubuntu 11.10 as by then the new Unity desktop interface will hopefully be more polished and usable, there's many pending kernel and open-source Mesa / Gallium3D improvements to hopefully land by then, Wayland may see some experimental adoption, etc. Also, in just over one week, the Ubuntu Developers' Summit for 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot.

Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" has been officially released this morning. Canonical's new Linux release that features their custom-designed Unity Desktop is now shipping along with improvements to their own Ubuntu Software Center, various package upgrades, and much more.

The bug introduced during the development of the Linux 2.6.38 kernel causing excessive power consumption is very real, is occurring on many different hardware platforms, and has just been deemed a bug of high importance by the Ubuntu Kernel Team. This serious regression was just made widely known on Friday in my Mobile Users Beware: Linux Has Major Power Regression article and then further detailed in The Tests Showing Ubuntu 11.04 On A Power Consumption Binge.

For those NVIDIA customers out there who haven't yet tried one of the test releases of Ubuntu 11.04 but are curious to know whether Canonical has enabled the open-source 3D acceleration driver via Gallium3D, they have not enabled the necessary support by default.

A week ago a discussion began on the Ubuntu development mailing list whether Ubuntu 11.04 should ship with Unity or the classic GNOME desktop as many people are concerned about the state of the Canonical-developed desktop and shipping it too prematurely. While it looks like they'll continue using Unity since they went ahead and released Ubuntu 11.04 Beta 2 yesterday without any change, they have some published some rather frightening results from their user testing.

There's just two weeks left until the planned release of Ubuntu 11.04, a.k.a. the Natty Narwhal. With the release candidate for Natty having been dropped due to scheduling issues around Easter, a second beta was released today by Canonical as the final pre-release.

The development discussion surrounding whether Ubuntu 11.04 should default to the classic GNOME desktop rather than the Unity Desktop being developed in-house at Canonical is ongoing. One of the latest discussions is over the lack of system tray support in Ubuntu 11.04 Unity and the new style of application notifications. An interesting comment was just posted by one of Canonical's employees.

Besides the MPlayer fighting that's now going on, the battles within the Ubuntu community isn't limited to GNOME vs. Unity on the desktop, but in fact the Ubuntu Developer Membership board and Community Council have jointly decided to expel one of the Ubuntu developers.

Earlier today Phoronix was the first publication to widely report that Ubuntu 11.04 may default to the GNOME classic desktop rather than the Unity desktop that Canonical has been developing viciously over the past few months. There's just too many bugs outstanding and issues with Unity, but here's the whole spiel about what their evaluation is coming down to in deciding whether to stick with Unity by default or instead use the classic GNOME desktop until presumably Ubuntu 11.10.

When Mark Shuttleworth and co announced last year that Ubuntu 11.04 would deploy a Canonical-developed Unity desktop environment instead of the GNOME 3.0 Shell or the classic GNOME2 desktop, many users were concerned by this move with Unity on Ubuntu Netbook not even being in great shape, etc. Concerns over Unity by default in Ubuntu 11.04 have only grown with the Unity interface in Ubuntu 11.04 Beta still being sluggish and broken in areas. Now it looks like Canonical may default Ubuntu 11.04 to using the classic desktop.

You may have heard of Launchpad's Bug #723831 this month, which is a bug to select the 'install third-party software' option in Ubuntu's LiveCD installer by default. By doing so, Adobe Flash support and various other non-free packages would effectively be installed by default, thereby providing a better "out of the box" experience where YouTube would be working nicely, etc. Obviously though including non-free software by default in Ubuntu is a hotly debated issue.

Not only did Canonical announce today their relatively uninteresting hardware database, but Kate Stewart, the Ubuntu Release Manager, announced a scheduling change for the Ubuntu 11.04 release candidate. There will be no release candidate for Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal", but an additional beta is now planned for release.

As expected, the second alpha release of "Natty Narwhal", a.k.a. Ubuntu 11.04, has been released today. This release switches over to using the Linux 2.6.38 kernel, replaces OpenOffice.org with LibreOffice, updates the graphics stack, and further enhances the Linux cloud computing experience.